


All This, And Love Too

by tanktrilby



Category: Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-25
Updated: 2015-10-25
Packaged: 2018-04-28 00:58:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5071843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tanktrilby/pseuds/tanktrilby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hakuryuu is a tired college student watching his best friend's love life explode like fireworks against the night-black sky.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All This, And Love Too

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gliss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gliss/gifts).



> Zura to my Eli, I stayed up till 5 a.m. writing this for you and then lied to your face about it, forgive me. I was planning on a proper ot3 fic but it turned into an epic that didn't make much sense which you will probably have to read anyway bc you're stuck with me for life. Happy birthday.

One day towards the end of spring, Hakuryuu found Alibaba sitting on the floor with his baseball cap crumpled in his hands.

“Why are you still awake,” he said, still mostly on autopilot. It was that sort of time of the year for them, when one of them being up and scrambling to classes and work meant the other having just crashed from the exhaustion of the same. Their conversations didn’t go very far beyond _you up?_ and _go to sleep, it’s almost dawn._

Alibaba didn’t look at him, but his hands tightened around his cap. He was staring at a spot on the wall where there was a stain vaguely in the shape of a dog, and there was a stillness about him, jarring considering it was _Alibaba,_ Alibaba who was always moving, always loud and bright and-

Hakuryuu stepped past him into the kitchen to make himself coffee. From the window he could see the main road, still fogged-up and sleepy, the traffic limited to a single red bus retracting its doors and pulling away from the stop. It was the same bus he and Alibaba took on hot days to visit Kougyoku to laze around in her pool, and Hakuryuu thought about that for a while, the memories summer-tinted, sticking in his mind and stretching like taffy.

Alibaba was in the same position he left him in when he comes back, so Hakuryuu sighed and nudged him with his toe.

“Do you still hate the world?” Alibaba asked, not taking his eyes off the stain.

Hakuryuu didn’t have the energy to roll his eyes, so he said, “Yeah.”

Alibaba curled in on himself tighter. His face was ashy like he was ill, and his eyes were so distant it made panic dig small, sharp teeth into the inside of Hakuryuu’s stomach, his hands opening and closing at his sides helplessly.

“I kind of think you’re on the right track there, Ryuu,” Alibaba said, and he laughed, short and horrible. “Got room for me to join?”

Hakuryuu thought back to the Alibaba of his memories, golden and joyous, hand outstretched, _c’mon Ryuu, it’ll be worth it, I promise!_

Hakuryuu covered his face with his arm for a minute, his eyes pressed closed, listening to Alibaba shift to look at him.

“Don’t be an idiot, Alibaba,” he said. He meant it to sound dismissive, but it came out weak and halting. “Wanting the world to burn is a strictly solitary activity.”

Alibaba was looking at him with his marble doll’s eyes. Hakuryuu felt an itch all along his skin, and the air seemed to go dry and stiticy. He recognized this feeling, but it couldn’t be right: why would he want to run away from Alibaba?

“Thought so,” Alibaba said, perfectly desolate, smile true.

Hakuryuu unconsciously tilted forward, his socked feet planted on the carpet. “I have work,” he murmured.

Alibaba nodded.

Hakuryuu turned around and shuffled off to get a blanket. Alibaba looked up at him, a line of consternation drawn across his forehead when Hakuryuu draped it over him.

“Don’t stay up,” Hakuryuu said, before he left. “The world will still be around for you to hate when you wake up.”

He felt Alibaba’s eyes follow him to the door, so he kept his back straight. “Maybe by the time I get back, you’ll be better at hating the world than I am.”

Alibaba huffed out a surprised laugh. “Okay,” he said, and it had the barest lilt to it, the smallest step away from his earlier monotone, and Hakuryuu’s heart fluttered with gladness.

*

It was noon and it was raining, raindrops clattering on the roof of the pavilion Hakuryuu was standing in. The campus had cleared out fast, students running for cover with their bags held over their heads and the blank, intent expression of the truly surprised. He watched the parallel lines of rainwater streaming down from the shingles of the roof like a scratch mark from a many-fingered hand.

Judal was sitting a careful distance behind him where he wouldn’t get splashed, as fastidious as a cat. One corner of his ridiculous braid had soaked through without him noticing, and Hakuryuu didn’t really feel like telling him. Perhaps later, when he didn’t want to punch Judal so badly.

“And, see, it’s pointless right?” Judal was saying. “I mean, I see why they would want me to be their supervisor, but those little shits are as dumb as bricks. I’m not touching them with a ten-foot pole. But the Head’s been on my ass forever, saying I’m not _contributing_ to the faculty, what a load of crap. Those stuffy fuckers should be more grateful.”

And then he stopped, and jabbed Hakuryuu’s ankle with his toe for attention. Hakuryuu resisted the urge to snap at him, go for his throat maybe: Judal was so fucking _irritating,_ did he think this shit was cute? Hakuryuu couldn’t understand how Alibaba could bear to be with someone this twitchy and hyperactive.

But then again, he wasn’t, was he? Not anymore. Hakuryuu had texted Sharrkan earlier, and gotten a dick pic (Sharrkan’s standard greeting) and a vague description of what had happened with Judal and Alibaba the night before. To an outsider’s eyes, it had looked like the cruelest rejection ever; Sharrkan asked Hakuryuu to buy Alibaba a beer for him.

Judal was fidgeting again, and again, Hakuryuu curbed the urge to punch him in the teeth and split the skin over his own knuckles. It would have been repayment, maybe, on one level: neither of them really deserved Alibaba.

“Sit still,” he said, voice rough and bitten-off. “Shut up.”

Judal’s leg stopped jiggling and his eyes went wide. “Oh? Is baby Ryuu picking a-”

Hakuryuu cut him off when he grabbed a fistful of his shirt, and Judal’s eyes were really wide now, coin-shaped, his mouth shocked out of its mocking sneer into something more uncertain.

“How can he be so moved by you,” Hakuryuu said, his voice soft and cold. “He cried the first time he heard you playing piano. He signed up for all your classes and chased you for so long. Why.”

Judal stared back. He had stopped moving at last, and making noise, and looking down on him. He looked the closest to being serious Hakuryuu had ever seen him, and the chill in his scarlet eyes was starkly familiar.

 _Red flame, blue flame,_ Alibaba had said once, laughing, tipsy from the empty bottles lined up on the table like soldiers. _He reminds me of you._

“Let me go,” Judal said, and twisted out of Hakuryuu’s surprise-slackened grip.

“Why,” Hakuryuu said, and then had to pause to clear his dry throat. Judal had his back turned to him, shoulders hiked up high and defensive, and he was in motion again: a finger was tap-tap-tapping away at his leg, and he kept shifting his weight from foot to foot.

“Why did you break up with him?”

“He’s annoying,” Judal said instantly, and Hakuryuu felt his fists clench. “He’s gaudy and cliché and doesn’t know how to talk to girls. Besides, we weren’t dating in the first place. He never got the guts to confess.”

“He was going to-”

“Spit it out at the lantern festival, I know.” Judal laughed, high and ugly. “So I got the jump on him and turned him down first. I can’t wait around for wimps like him to grow a spine. You should have seen him, Hakuryuu. He kept geeking out about the lanterns, and that hair of his, his eyes, and the lanterns looked like they were just _made_ to light him up, you know? It was really fucking stupid.”

He stepped outside and he had a crazy gleam in his eye, and Hakuryuu wanted nothing more than to walk away and keep this rain-drenched lunatic out of their lives. Judal was laughing, desolate in the same way Alibaba had been, this moment of absolute synchronization of two people that he realized were in love. They acted like distant echoes of each other, locked into orbit.

“You asked me what he saw in me, Ryuu,” Judal shouted, his fingers digging into his sodden hair, looking like he’d gotten in a train crash. “Do I look like I have any idea? He’s seven years younger than me and he looks at me like I hung the stars and the moon, what am I s’posed to do with that? How can I love back the way some kind of god would?”

Before he could fling himself off that particular clifftop, Hakuryuu reached over and whacked him with his umbrella.

Judal froze like he’d been caught. “Why do you have that thing. It wasn’t supposed to rain today, Hakuryuu, what the fuck.”

“Because it’s my job, since I keep hanging out with people who want to rush out into the rain,” Hakuryuu said, simply. Judal stared at him like a puzzled puppy, so he sighed. “Get under the umbrella, Judal. We’re going home. If you want to be dramatic in the rain, do it with someone who wants to do it with you.

“He knows you’re human. Why do you think he waited so long to confess? God knows you’re nothing like what you look like when you’re playing.” Hakuryuu shook his umbrella open and stepped towards Judal to look up at him. “And despite how _he_ usually acts, you have to trust that he’s smart enough to know that.”

Judal looked like he’d had the breath punched clean out of him, and Hakuryuu tilted his umbrella a little to shelter them both.

“What, did you change your mind about me not deserving him?” Judal asked. His voice was low and a little hoarse.

Hakuryuu kept watching the rain, the little ricochet of the raindrops after they hit the paved road. He felt like there was a bow inside him, stretched to the point of snapping for the longest time, had finally been let loose.

“No,” he said, and leaned closer to Judal so that neither of them were getting wet anymore. “But then, it’s not our decision to make.”

*

Alibaba was still asleep when they arrived, fingers clutching at the blanket Hakuryuu had given him. A shard of blind-cut sunlight was falling in an uneven stroke down his face and neck, lighting up his blonde hair gold. A thought rolled in Hakuryuu’s mind, lacking definition, nothing more than pure instinct: _you should be sleeping_. Seeing Alibaba made Hakuryuu automatically adjust all his own internal clocks, setting them on what Alibaba was doing, and what he, in turn, should do. He was Hakuryuu’s single unchanging point of reference, like a compass pointing true north.

Judal swallowed with an audible click. Small drops of water splished from his clothes and the end of his braid on to the carpet, and his hands kept opening and closing compulsively, grabbing at thin air. A wretched sort of longing was written all across his face in blazing calligraphy. Hakuryuu imagined the fingermarks on Judal’s palms, going white and then filling out every time they clenched and unclenched.

“Just talk to him,” Hakuryuu said, in answer to the unspoken question he saw caught in Judal’s throat. “Tell him about your lectures. About that giant Vegeta some kid drew on your white board.”

Judal turned to him, eyes wide and lost.

The quality of the silence shifted. Hakuryuu tensed; the fringe of Alibaba’s eyelashes were lifting, motion catching on to his bent-up limbs. A frown snagged on his forehead.

Judal made a noise like there wasn’t enough air in the room. His entire body jerked forward. “Don’t sleep down there,” he said, low, with a rasp of something scared and distressed in his voice. “You’ll fuck up your back. Loser.”

Hakuryuu saw Alibaba’s eyes yank open, half-asleep still, staring at Judal like he was a part of Alibaba’s dream.

The last thing Hakuryuu saw before he shut the door behind him was Alibaba mouthing Judal’s name in that dreamlike way, and Judal kneeling down to look at him, half-amazed, like he was something soft and precious beyond belief.

*

Two weeks later, Hakuryuu woke up to find Judal and Alibaba huddled under a blanket sharing a mug of soup. Judal kept blowing the steam into Alibaba’s eyes, and Alibaba was laughing, golden head lowered to stifle his snickers.

Hakuryuu moved past without saying a word, exhausted. _Six am,_ he thought, _Alibaba’s shift ended two hours ago. I have class in thirty minutes, twenty if I want to revise._

When Alibaba upturned the mug into Judal’s lap while scrambling to apologize, though, Hakuryuu managed to smile a deeply tired smile.

“You should be asleep,” he told Alibaba.

Alibaba smiled back, ignoring Judal’s howls. “I will, I will.” He leapt to his feet hopefully. “Are we on this Friday to watch shitty Korean dramas together?”

Hakuryuu exhaled, quiet and at peace. “Yeah,” he said.

**Author's Note:**

> ANY RESEMBLANCE TO REAL PERSONS, LIVING OR DEAD, IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
